Hey, Ricky, Kristen Wiig is stealing your movie!

The Ghost Town junket gives the press 20 minutes with Kristen Wiig - which is about twice as much time as she has in the movie.

[rssbreak]

Fortunately, Wiig doesn't need a lot of time to make an impression. The Saturday Night Live star very nearly stole Knocked Up with a few brief appearances as a network suit trying to get Katherine Heigl to keep her weight down; in Ghost Town, she has precisely two scenes as a spectacularly incompetent proctologist who really, really doesn't want to admit that she briefly killed the movie's star, Ricky Gervais.

The scenes are key to establishing the movie's premise - Gervais comes back being able to see dead people; wackiness ensues - and Wiig is featured prominently in the movie's trailer. She shows up, and people laugh.

"Sometimes that's also, like, a little more pressure," she explains. " ‘Okay, I've got four lines and they want me to do something with it.' But (director) David Koepp and I had talked about it beforehand, and found what would be funny in the scene: Rather than just the doctor telling him he had died, we decided I was just the worst doctor in the world."

Watching her play the medical equivalent of a brick wall to Gervais' indignant jackhammer - is that overdoing the metaphor? - proves a singular delight. But Wiig won't take any credit for the moment.

"I can't steal a scene from him if I tried," she says. "I'm like a huge dorky fan of his."

Wiig has become a reliable quick-hit performer, even if she doesn't always make it into the final cut. "I was in Forgetting Sarah Marshall," she says. "I played a yoga instructor. And it was like this seven-minute scene, and they couldn't chop it up. But it's on the DVD."

And by the time you read this, Wiig will be on her way back to New York, moving on to the new season of Saturday Night Live.

"Oh my god, I can't wait. I'm sure the read-through stack is going to be that big. There's so much going on, and the political stuff - it's crazy. And everybody's talking about it, and waiting for it. I'm so excited to go back. It gets to that point where you really miss it - the whole cast and crew is like a big family. You miss it when you're not there."